’Honestly, I thought he was suicidal’

Lana Burpee was stunned when a float plane flew under the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge in Ottawa last weekend.

Burpee, president of the Ottawa Rowing Club, was standing on the dock on the Ottawa River on Saturday morning as most of the club’s athletes were preparing for the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta when she heard a strange noise and saw a small float plane rising out on the water.

“I’m watching the plane from the dock and I’m seeing its nose lifting and I thought ‘What could it be doing?’” she said.

A video uploaded to YouTube shows the plane taking off from the Ottawa River and flying below the bridge.

A group of rowers on the water look on, and some can be heard screaming and yelling as the plane flies under the bridge that connects Ottawa and Gatineau, Que.

Burpee said it was unusual to see a plane on the Ottawa River, especially around the downtown core, but what happened next made her gasp. The plane picked up speed and lifted off.

Honestly, I thought he was suicidal. I thought he was going to try to smash into the side of the bridge

“Honestly, I thought he was suicidal. I thought he was going to try to smash into the side of the bridge, but fortunately the pilot was able to get through that ascent safely,” she said.

She said the pilot was “a heartbeat away it could have been the worst-case scenario.”

Her husband managed to capture a roughly one-minute video of the plane just as it was taking off.

Burpee said she thought was the pilot was being “completely reckless” and that flying under the bridge was an unnecessary stunt.

She described the incident, which happened over the span of roughly five minutes as “crazy, reckless and endangering”, since there were at least a dozen small boats on the water at the time.

When the plane cleared the bridge, her thought was “we’re spared what could have been something pretty ugly” followed by disbelief “because you go who would do this, it’s crazy, completely crazy.”